DemoRESILdigital: Democratic resilience in times of online-propaganda, fake news, fear- and hate speech (DemoRESILdigital)
Basic data for this project
Type of project: Individual project
Duration: 01/01/2018 - 31/03/2023
Description
Our society becomes more and more digitalized. Beyond new opportunities for democratic participation, the ongoing digitalization also offers multiple options for the dissemination of manipulative and non-democratic content. Strategic actors misuse the eased access to digital public spheres for the spreading of online-propaganda, fake news, fear and hate speech. Manipulative contents, which have been assumed to weaken democracy as a whole.Counter-strategies, which focus solely on the repression of certain contents, are both limited by the speed and dynamic of digital dissemination channels as well as by the potential risk of censorship. Complementary prevention strategies that strengthen the individual resistance against digital manipulation, their digital democratic resilience, are thus inevitable.The effective implementation of counter-strategies fostering digital democratic resilience needs to be rooted in a deep understanding of the effects of online-propaganda, fake news, fear and hate speech. Who are the agents, that spread manipulative content online? Who is targeted? And with which effect? Which factors influence the recipients' resilience?These questions are the starting point for the interdisciplinary junior research group "DemoRESILdigital", bringing together communication scientists, psychologists, and economic computer scientists who employ an innovative combination of methods from social sciences, computer sciences, data science and the experimental media-effects research in their attempt to answer the afore mentioned questions. The junior research group is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science Nord-Rhine Westfalia in the funding line "strengthening and securing democracy in the digital society" (http://graduiertenkolleg-digitale-gesellschaft.nrw/) and started in January 2018.
Keywords: Online-Propaganda; Fake news; Fear speech; Hate speech; Media effects; Resilience; Computational Social Science; Communication Science; Digital Communication; Media Psychology; data science; information science